On February 28, 2014, my mother Joyce and I finished a month of guest hosting a local women's program for KSCE-TV. For our final show, we chose to discuss Common Core and our family's own experiences with homeschooling.
Common Core was funded through the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and the "standards" it imposes greatly accelerate the decline of academics that we have been witnessing in our country over the past forty years. Common Core seeks to replace English literature with non fiction works, seeks to shift all emphasis from classical education to social engineering and works to create a system of learning math in which the right answer does not matter as long as the student can explain to the teacher how he got the answer he did. Teachers are now "change agents" who are instructed to read the Gettysburg Address with no emotion and no context. This complete lack of standards for students also comes with its own language for parents--an Orwelian speak designed to prevent the parents from understanding anything that is being said.
Perhaps most disturbing are the tracking and data mining aspects of Common Core. Schools are creating systems that will allow them to track the preferences, poltical leanings and prejudices of the students and their families from kindergarten through high school graduation.
Parents still have alternatives, but they have to know that those alternatives exist and that they are worth the sacrifice that they involve. That is one reason we wanted to talk about the struggles our family faced during our own homeschooling journey. It is our hope that our family's experiences with homeschoolung will help other parents understand that they can take control of their children's educations and will inspire them to do so while they still can.
I am linking the video of our show here:
As background on Common Core, I am also reposting my post on this subject from last year: Rejecting Big Government and Common Core Standards in Favor of Parental Rights:
Last week Glenn Beck's pantomime of giving triage to a dying Lady Liberty while she lay bleeding and gasping on the floor of his studio went viral across the conservative internet. Beck finished his pantomime by admonishing parents to get their kids out of government schools because the schools are turning the kids against the parents.
Common Core was funded through the 2009 American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and the "standards" it imposes greatly accelerate the decline of academics that we have been witnessing in our country over the past forty years. Common Core seeks to replace English literature with non fiction works, seeks to shift all emphasis from classical education to social engineering and works to create a system of learning math in which the right answer does not matter as long as the student can explain to the teacher how he got the answer he did. Teachers are now "change agents" who are instructed to read the Gettysburg Address with no emotion and no context. This complete lack of standards for students also comes with its own language for parents--an Orwelian speak designed to prevent the parents from understanding anything that is being said.
Perhaps most disturbing are the tracking and data mining aspects of Common Core. Schools are creating systems that will allow them to track the preferences, poltical leanings and prejudices of the students and their families from kindergarten through high school graduation.
Parents still have alternatives, but they have to know that those alternatives exist and that they are worth the sacrifice that they involve. That is one reason we wanted to talk about the struggles our family faced during our own homeschooling journey. It is our hope that our family's experiences with homeschoolung will help other parents understand that they can take control of their children's educations and will inspire them to do so while they still can.
I am linking the video of our show here:
As background on Common Core, I am also reposting my post on this subject from last year: Rejecting Big Government and Common Core Standards in Favor of Parental Rights:
Last week Glenn Beck's pantomime of giving triage to a dying Lady Liberty while she lay bleeding and gasping on the floor of his studio went viral across the conservative internet. Beck finished his pantomime by admonishing parents to get their kids out of government schools because the schools are turning the kids against the parents.
Beck is exactly right about this; one of the reasons that our country is sliding so far to the left is that progressive social engineering has been happening in this country for over 40 years. Now, however, social engineering is accelerating to a whole new level as the Common Core Standards are implemented across the country.
In today's column, conservative blogger and bestselling author Michelle Malkin explains that Big Government wants to control not only what your children learn, but how they process it, respond to it and feel about it. They also want to be able to track your children's behaviours, attitudes, likes and dislikes from infancy through high school graduation, and use that information both for research and for profit. Malkin cites a Department of Education report which underscores that the true intention of Common Core Standards is not to make sure that all children learn, but that the Federal Government has a firm grip on exactly what attitudes, beliefs and concepts the children leave school with. States Malkin,
"The DOE report exposes the big lie that Common Core is about raising academic standards by revealing its progressive designs to measure and track children’s “competencies” in “recognizing bias in sources,” “flexibility,” “cultural awareness and competence,” “appreciation for diversity,” “empathy,” “perspective taking, trust (and) service orientation.”
Read Malkin's full article, which also contains a link to Glenn Beck's recent work on CCS, here.
In an era when our young people are graduating from school with minimal skills and competencies, but a strong foundation in liberalism, sex ed, and socialism, it is outrageous that politicians in both parties are pushing the Common Core Standards and this new federal tracking of students attitudes and behaviours. The CCS, along with President Obama's new push for universal preschool, the folly of which has been explained in today's Morning Bell, are designed to ensure that the government can get fully inside the head of every kid in America starting at age 4 and lasting through high school. Children who have been indoctrinated into this system are foundational to the liberal, socialist, godless society that our federal educational system has been building for the last generation.
After the 2012 elections, I saw Charles Krauthammer interviewed on Fox News. He was asked whether he believed that the young people who voted for Barack Obama the second time were a permanent block of reliable liberal voters. He responded that normally people become more conservative as they get older--as they get married and get jobs and mortgages and have children of their own, the desire for universal welfare is commonly replaced by the desire for lower tax brackets. Traditionally what Krauthammer says has been true; young radicals grow into middle aged accountants with values that more closely resemble their parents. But in the case of the new generation that is growing up, I think Krauthammer's formula no longer applies. The 60's hippies were rebelling against a "plastic culture". They understood the values of their parents--they just rejected them only to find out that liberal, leftist politics work better in theory than in practice. Unlike the previous generations of young people who grew up, got married, got jobs and cut their hair, this new generation is actually not rebelling against anything. They have been programmed and engineered into an odd conglomeration of Peter Pan, Fifty Shades of Grey and Karl Marx. They have been taught that they should never have to work, be responsible, or grow up, that socialism is good and capitalism is bad, that intolerance is the only sin a person can commit and that traditional family structures are old-fashioned, boring, repressive, and no fun. People so indoctrinated at such an early age cannot "grow up" to be conservative, responsible adults--they don't even have a concept of what that means. Children who start out at age four in government daycare, spend their formative years in a completely socialist system, and then spend their college years enjoying "Sex week" at major universities are going to emerge so damaged ,that they will never rehabilitate into stable, productive, hard working Americans who support freedom and independence. (This is the 21st century "Jedi Mind Meld" that Obama complained two weeks ago that he could not use on Congress and Senate. Progressives know that they just have to be patient--they cannot change the attitudes of "set in our ways" freedom loving conservatives, but if they can get control of our children, they can make us as extinct as the dinosaur within one generation.)
And that takes me back to Beck's speech about getting kids out of the public school system. I am a product of homeschooling--my mother homeschooled me and my nine younger brothers and sisters starting in 1975, before the word "homeschooling" had even been coined. We did not meet another homeschooling family until I was fourteen years old. We used accredited correspondence schools and skipped no grades whatsoever, but each of us had a master's degree from California State University before our seventeenth birthdays--completely educated by a very hard working woman with only a high school diploma whose previous work experience consisted of being a secretary.
Homeschooling provides students with a completely different world view than that held by people in public or private schools. Today there are estimates of between 2 and 6 million homeschoolers in this country, including second generation homeschoolers such as my nieces and nephews. This block represents a small but significant segment of people who have been taught to think outside of the system. Homeschooling by parents who really want to not only educate their children but shape their character and prevent their indoctrination into the "New World Order" is the best hope that this country has for salvaging its future.
Homeschoolers beware, however, because the federal government's Common Core Standards are coming to a textbook near you. Many companies that sell textbooks to homeschoolers have signed on to the Common Core Standards. Last week, homeschooling mother and conservative advocate Tina Hollenbeck began contacting companies that sell textbooks to homeschoolers to find out whether their companies were not aligned with CCS, were coincidentally aligned, or were consciously aligned. She has compiled three lists which are now available on her website which you can visit here. Her website also contains a link to her Facebook group.
If you just simply cannot homeschool, you can still opt out of the Federal database tracking system being implemented through the Common Core System. Malkin's blog references a form that parents can sign and submit to school districts to protect the privacy of their children and prevent the federal government and major corporations from tracking their kids through school. This will at least protect their privacy, though it won't do much to protect their minds.
If you are interested in homeschooling, numerous resources are available to help you get started. The time and the money you will spend are not just an investment in your children--it is an investment in America's future, which is currently hanging in the balance.
Alexandra Swann is the author of No Regrets: How Homeschooling Earned me a Master's Degree at Age Sixteen and several other books. Her novel, The Chosen, about one small group of Americans' fight to restore the Constitution and end indefinite detentions without trial, is available on Kindle and in paperback. For more information, visit her website at http://www.frontier2000.net.
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